


Coin Tricks

by ChocoChipBiscuit



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-03-31 00:21:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19038553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocoChipBiscuit/pseuds/ChocoChipBiscuit
Summary: Isabela’s always made her own luck, but it never hurts to have a lucky piece.





	Coin Tricks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Razzaroo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razzaroo/gifts).



> Many thanks to [sweettasteofbitter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweettasteofbitter) for beta'ing. :')

“Carry a coin in your shoe, and you’ll always land in money.”

Isabela’s words carry her mother’s echo, long chains of memory clattering across leagues of open sea and devastated tables set with bone-clay cups and silver. She had worn a gold ring tighter than any shackle, sipped tea and learned manners and swirled her cup to read her fortune, over and over, until she learned to make her own luck.

Isabela still carries a coin in her shoe, though. A copper luck-piece, some Antivan bastard’s face stamped on one side. It pleases her to grind him down with every step.

Of course, all that’s rather much to explain to Merrill, sweet kitten, with her brows knit tight and her lips moving as she chews on this new piece of knowledge. She’ll bite herself bloody if she overthinks it.

“But Isabela, I don’t _wear_ shoes.”

There’s a cowlick on the inside of Merrill’s eyebrow, wayward hairs gone spiky. Isabela licks her thumb and smoothes it down before answering.

“That’s all right. I’ll carry an extra, just for you.”

Choosing one’s luck-piece is no easy thing; one must consider age, patina, the shape and comeliness of the face it bears. One is spoilt for choice in a port city like Kirkwall, where the sea brings merchants and sailors from a stewpot of nations, each bearing coins from their many homelands and histories. The weights are close enough that a Fereldan bit is fair trade for an Orlesian penny, and only the most ardently foolish of patriots will argue the worth of a sovereign versus a royal. Merrill absolutely refuses to consider a silver coin embossed with a particularly heavy-browed Nevarran ruler, leaving Isabela to gamble and exchange it for a handful of Ander griffons and a bent crown.

“Oh, it’s all out of shape. Is it angry?”

“Traveller’s bend, kitten.” Isabela dunks it in the sailor’s drink to rinse it, ignoring his cry of dismay, then tucks it under her tongue. She grins, open-mouthed, the beer and metal tangy on the back of her throat. “Old merchant’s trick, hiding your money.”

“What if they swallowed it?”

Isabela spits out the coin, this time wiping it on her shirt. The sailor continues moaning over his drink, so Isabela rolls her eyes and orders him another. He still has gold on the table, and Isabela’s not done winning. “I’d cut them open,” she says, menacing him with her grin.

“No, I meant—what if they choked?”

“Well, that’s one reason they stopped doing it.”

“Was there another?”

“Miser’s madness,” Isabela says, palming two queens as she cuts the deck. “Try that same trick with lead coins and you’ll get sick.”

Merrill considers this very carefully, her nose scrunched with the effort. Isabela shuffles the deck, tapping it together so the cards whisper soft into the snug of her hand.

Finally, Merrill says, “I don’t think lead would make a very good luck-piece.”

Isabela hums agreement. She holds out her hand for Merrill to kiss, one last piece of luck before Isabela plays the man for his last piece of gold.

The luck isn’t necessary; Isabela cheats.

Merrill’s lips are chapped against her knuckles, though, so Isabela vows to buy her a beeswax balm on the way back to the alienage.

Shopping ends up having to wait, though. Merrill’s always been a diligent thing, scrubbing every inch of her tiny home spotless and nourishing her potted garden with words like water and water like words, singing as she pours. Her absent-minded sweetness isn’t ignorance, even if she’ll miss her turn and go barefoot-padding from one end of Kirkwall to the other or miss the thieving fingers on her purse—until Isabela takes it upon herself to steal back not only Merrill’s coins but a few more beside, because Isabela’s merciless on the local lightfingers in the way that only a _professional_ can be. Merrill bends her vast memory and meticulously inked notes to the acquisition of knowledge, to fulfilling whatever esoteric charge has been laid on her.

So Merrill keeps a little chalk and slate reckoning of all the coins they’ve tried—copper bit, silver andris, Nevarran gulder—until it becomes easier to list the coins they _haven’t_ tried, the ones that Isabela can surreptitiously lift or exchange in a game of cards. They even lay hands on an Andraste’s Tear from Serault, but while the glass coin glitters jewels across Merrill’s palm it is too thick to comfortably stash in Isabela’s boot. It was worth a ridiculous sum, too, five sovereigns for something that didn’t even have the weight of proper metal, governed only by novelty and the fickle taste of collectors.

“It would have been too dear to spend,” Merrill says, snipping off a stem from one of her succulents. They crowd their pot to bursting, shades of green and jade spilling over the red-glazed rim. The cuttings are relegated to smaller pots rescued from a potter’s jumble sale, a chipped and bulging assortment lumpier than a summer squash.

“That’s the point of a luck-piece. You _don’t_ spend it,” Isabela argues, but it’s simply for the sake of stretching her jaw and drowning out the birds nesting above Merrill’s stoop. Merrill calls them house sparrows, and they’re cute little things, all bobbing up and down and chirping, but their droppings spatter everything like a mad Orlesian painter. Isabela calls them ‘poop sparrows’ when she’s feeling polite. “We’ll just have to find you the perfect one.”

At least the search is enjoyable. There is something pleasingly _tactile_ about coins, their presence, their weight. They create a money-shaped hole in the world, and without currency people would be reduced to trading for eggs or sheep or undyed yarn, all tremendously messy and inconvenient to borrow or steal. Coins then fill that gap with their own presence. It’s tautological, really, which Isabela can define if not always spell, because if Isabela didn’t love coins then she’d love what coins could buy. They make a lovely jangly music in one’s purse, and she adores their smooth edges and cold feel and the way they kiss her palms and how she can still do the little finger wiggle that walks a Fereldan silver across her knuckles in front of an amazed Merrill.

Merrill claps her hands. “Do it again!”

Isabela obliges, flipping the coin from finger to finger before tucking it on top of her pinky and sliding it across her palm. There’s a bit of patter that should go with it, Casavir would know, but she left the idiot on the docks in Val Chevin and she can’t remember how it goes. Something about walking the plank.

She’ll just make it up anyways.

Isabela cups her hand, tucking the coin into the comfortable spot between her third and fourth finger, angling to make it look like it vanished. Or it _would_ , if Merrill had been watching Isabela’s hand, but Merrill’s gaze is fixed so intently on Isabela that it’s a wonder Isabela doesn’t just shut up and kiss her.

Isabela tries again.

“So. The navy caught a pirate, sent her to walk the plank.”

Isabela flicks the coin into view, producing it between thumb and forefinger. It winks like a silver moon, fat and happy.

“She took her time walking. Waggled her hips, flayed them with her tongue.”

Coin flip, over and over. A slow walk, traveling the breadth of her knuckles. Isabela does this without looking. She only watches the reflection in Merrill’s eyes, the way Merrill’s mouth parts with anticipation.

“But when the time came to drop into the water—”

Now’s the tricky bit, thumb under the pinky and a final flip, and Isabela tries to make it smooth as possible as she palms the coin, clapping her hands together.

“ _Splash!_ And they thought they saw the last of her, but—”

Merrill gives the most _gratifying_ gasp of delight as she realizes the coin has disappeared. It wouldn’t work if Isabela flipped her palm, but she’s got broad hands and strong fingers, good for tying knots and vanishing coins, and it’s hidden safely behind Isabela’s first two fingers and her thumb.

“Rumor says that when the moon was high, the waves lapping gently against the hull of the ship—that pirate just,” Isabela croons, tapping her fingers under Merrill’s chin, angling for a kiss. She does so without turning her hand, tilting so the silver remains hidden from Merrill. “ _Reappeared_. To reclaim what was hers.”

She times it just right, producing the coin from under Merrill’s chin, Merrill’s mouth widening as Isabela kisses her full on the lips. Isabela could melt against Merrill, all the soft and bony edges of her, but contents herself with one last swipe of her tongue across Merrill’s before drawing back.

“How do you do that?”

“Practice. Too much practice spent on long voyages,” Isabela chuckles. “There’s a trick to it. Are you sure you want to learn? Some people think it takes the fun out of it.”

“I’d rather learn the fun of it.”

It takes some time to find a coin to fit Merrill’s hand, because size matters, don’t let anyone tell you different, and usually a larger coin works better for the vanish by allowing the hand to stay loose and natural. But _technique_ matters just as much, and while a silver piece sits snug in Isabela’s hand, it turns out that an Orlesian penny actually fits Merrill’s narrow fingers more comfortably.

They start with the coin walk that had enchanted Merrill so, then Isabela teaches her how to tuck it between her fingers, how to angle her body and laugh and distract from the fact that she doesn’t need sleeves to hide anything, how to produce the coin with a flourish and—with much more practice, using a Fereldan bit so that Merrill and Isabela can track the two coins—how to hide and exchange them.

“You’re too serious, kitten. Anyone can tell there’s a trick when you’re concentrating.”

“But I _am_ concentrating.” Merrill seems to take as much pleasure from the process as from the result, practicing what Isabela mentally dubs ‘pointless tricks’ where she vanishes and produces the same coin from behind her back or exchanges identical pennies.

“You can use the coins to tell stories. Pull the moon from the sky, turn silver to gold. It’s wonderfully dramatic and will get you thrown out of all the best places, then invited to better ones.”

Merrill chews her lip, working that one out. The coin wobbles in her hands.

“But if you’re invited to _better_ places, surely you weren’t in the _best_ places to begin?”

Isabela blows a raspberry. “Don’t try logic on me. Money talks, sure as a pendulum swings.” A thought and a hop, like skipping stones across the lake of memory. “That’s a type of fortune-telling, you knot your thread around a coin and use it to find your future.” With a smirk, she adds, “But a good charlatan knows how to make the coins dance.”

Merrill giggles, and manages to produce the coin with a flourish, thumb flipping it so it pops up like a daisy. “We did a similar thing, among the Dalish. The young ones. You can pluck petals off a flower to make it tell you ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but everyone cheats a little. You want to pick the _right_ flower, maybe count the petals first. Or take a nice flat piece of bone—scapula from a deer, maybe, or the belly of a turtle’s shell—and write a question on it, then set it in a fire and see how it cracks. I was six before I realized that Tamlen was cheating.”

Her gestures slow as she tells the story, smoothing themselves out.

Isabela claps her hands, cheering as Merrill finally manages the coinwalk. Merrill flushes, dropping the coin, but Isabela catches it and slips it back into Merrill’s hand.

“See? It’s easier when you talk! A little bit of misdirection never hurts.”

“But I’m not _lying_ , Isabela.”

“Neither am I. But if you distract someone, like so—see? Nothing in my hand, nothing in _this_ hand, either,” Isabela says, alternating between a truly empty hand and one which has a silver lovingly concealed, “it’s harder for them to follow the trick.”

Which is how Isabela spins her own history, letting it land on the most current truth. The _present_ truth, if you will. Because Isabela doesn’t lie, not exactly, and never to Merrill, but she likes to polish her stories, rounding off the edges so they won’t cut her with the facts.

“That might be so,” Merrill acknowledges, setting down her coins and watering her plants. The cuttings have flourished in their lumpy pots, waxy leaves plump and full. A few of them have even grown rosy on the tips, long fingers reaching for sunlight. “I do love learning all your tricks, but I realized something.”

“What’s that, kitten?”

“I don’t need a luck-piece. I have you.”

And Isabela’s heart might grow three sizes too big for her chest, it hurts so much, but she puffs out her bosom and swallows down the unexpected joy of it as she purrs, “Well, I’ve always made my own luck.”

**Author's Note:**

> Look, if anyone wants to write the follow-up fic where, in a world without coins, Isabela must steal a sheep... GO FOR IT!!!


End file.
